Finished this in about 6 hours with 6 deaths. That was surprisingly a lot shorter than I thought but I really enjoyed the quest overall. To begin with, this is a massive improvement over your first Link's Rise quest and I had quite a good time with it. The overworld is designed really nicely and I like the progression throughout the quest. Screen design in overworlds, dungeons and caves were very well made and I liked the themes throughout some dungeons to distinguish them between each other. The difficulty progression felt good and the difficulty curve was good too. Nothing felt too hard or too easy. Soundtrack was also pretty nice as well (big fan of the overworld song). I think the biggest positive of this quest is how open everything gets after the first dungeon. I really wasn't expecting things to open up so much and going into multiple dungeons in any order was quite refreshing (though these had an issue which I'll explore in a moment).
As for the negatives, there isn't anything much I didn't like about the majority of the quest, save for the end and some things with dungeons. I kinda felt like the end of the quest was a bit too abrupt and rushed and the final dungeon could've been expanded on much more instead of a straight forward path. You could probably try to have something more complex and something that felt more like a final dungeon to make it more final-like. In addition to this, some other dungeons felt a bit too straight-forward too and there wasn't much of split paths I could take to get different items at different times. It would've been useful to have more branching paths to avoid having situations like getting keys to use for locks in the same room which is something I noticed a lot. This isn't necessarily too big of an issue though, but it's something I picked up on quite a bit. The biggest issue I have with the dungeons is the fact that you need items from other dungeons to complete them. The big problem with this is that it kind of destroys the non-linear concept in some way, though not completely since I can leave dungeons with them to get more items. However, it can be a bit annoying to not complete a lot of them until a later point and gives me that illusion of being non-linear when it somewhat isn't sometimes. I think if making other dungeon items not required it would be much better, but that's what I would do personally, however I will admit that I am guilty of doing this myself so it's a really easy thing to do by accident.
Other than those main points, there are three small things I noticed.
This happens when you walk through walls and bomb walls where Link appears above the wall. This can easily be fixed by changing the outer wall combos to "overhead" types. This will ensure Link doesn't look weird like he does here. There is a tile miscolouring
here that's a very easy fix. And finally, there is another small error
here where a missing water border tile was found below Link.
Overall this was a very fun quest and I had a good time throughout the majority of it. The final section was a bit of a letdown which sucks since I really thought there would be more after that, and I've already explained my other issues. I'm kinda jumping between a solid 4 and a 4.5, so I think I'll go in the middle and give this one a 4.25/5, which still rounds down to a 4, but this was pretty fun to play. Good luck on any future quests!
I actually thought there were more areas to explore (in the northeast and to the west) and an additional two dungeons (because of the empty space in the middle of the triforce) but I ended up in a cave where I found Ganon and the game ended with his defeat, to my surprise. I felt a bit sad after finishing it because it is hard to find quests with just the right difficulty level (neither too easy or impossibly difficult) in the original NES style. Hope to play another sequel of this in the future. Thanks for the enjoyable hours.
